Protest March

Hoping to calm the furor created when UCLA police used a Taser to subdue a student studying in Powell Library, the university's acting chancellor announced Friday that a veteran Los Angeles law enforcement watchdog would head up an independent investigation of the incident.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Oscar Arias, whose inauguration returned him to Costa Rica's presidency after 16 years, promised to work to stabilize the economy. About 4,000 marchers demanded that Costa Rica not ratify a free-trade pact with the U.S., which Arias supports.

Northern Ireland police used a steel barricade to bar Protestant hard-liners from parading through the main Catholic section of divided Portadown. The annual confrontation between Orangemen and the predominantly Protestant police force has triggered protracted rioting several times. But on Sunday, police donned no heavy riot gear and required no British army backup as Orange leaders and members appeared to concede defeat in the long-running dispute over the parade route, blocked since 1998.

A meeting about plans to turn a Hollywood nightclub into a fire station ended in a near-melee Thursday when scores of angry opponents lost the argument and booed some of the city's most powerful officials. After a series of speakers urged the City Hall committee to save the popular and historic Florentine Gardens, the officials voted against them with little discussion. As protesters yelled "Shame! Shame!" sergeants-at-arms tried to clear the room, and the protest moved to the streets.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon lashed out Sunday against what he called growing incitement toward violence by opponents of his Gaza Strip withdrawal plan, while tens of thousands of Jewish settlers and their supporters gathered here to protest the proposed pullout.

In June, Rux Johnson hitchhiked from Colorado to Georgia to protest the G-8 economic summit. Three weeks later, he bummed a ride to Lawrence, Kan., for a conference on anarchism before moving on to Nashville to work at a radical bookstore. This month, Johnson joined up with members of Democracy Uprising, a group devoted to grass-roots activism, and marched 258 miles with them from the site of the Democratic Party convention in Boston to the Republican Party gathering in Manhattan.

Catholic hard-liners attacked British soldiers and police after parades by the Orange Order, Northern Ireland's major Protestant brotherhood. No serious injuries were reported. In Ardoyne, Catholic men and teenage boys surrounded several parked army jeeps with soldiers inside, smashed the windows, and tried to tip them over. Riot police used water cannons to drive back the mob.

About 3,000 anti-globalization activists marched in Warsaw against a European economic summit, protesting capitalism, unemployment and the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Police barriers kept the protesters away from a hotel where hundreds of business and political leaders attended the second day of a conference on the future of the expanded European Union. The demonstration was mostly peaceful, and no arrests were reported.

Despite the democratic gains of recent years, basic individual freedoms in Mexico still can be trumped by old-fashioned political muscle. Jose Luis Lopez and Enrique Avila Garduno say they found that out the hard way. Lopez, an accountant, and Avila, a chauffeur, recently spent a harrowing week in one of Mexico's most notorious prisons. Their crime? Using foul language. The pair deny they swore at anyone.

Marie Foster, a civil rights activist who helped launch the Selma, Ala., voting rights movement and was brutally beaten by state troopers in an infamous attack during a 1965 march to Montgomery, has died. She was 85. Foster entered a Selma hospital Friday and died Saturday. The cause of death was not released. Close friends and colleagues of Foster noted that although she was in failing health, she continued to be an active participant in social welfare issues in Selma and the state.